What are the keywords of advice you would share with anyone who needs to accelerate the introduction, adoption, and profitability of digital content and products globally in 2018? While I have been asked this question several times for the last couple of months, my answer has been very similar regardless of industry and background. Think about investing in meeting the level of authenticity and empathy that your local customers require!

Michelle Manafy

Michelle Manafy is the senior editor of Min, which publishes the Media Industry Newsletter -- the go-to resource for advertising data, news, deals, trends and personnel moves shaping the consumer magazine publishing industry -- and hosts the industry's premier events and awards programs. Previously, Michelle held the position of Editor-in-chief at Free Pint Limited, a global publisher of sites, research and resources that support the value of information in the enterprise. Prior to joining FreePint, Michelle served as the Editorial Director of the Enterprise Group for Information Today, Inc. where she was editor of EContent Magazine and chair of the Buying & Selling eContent Conference and Enterprise Search Summits. She is the co-editor of and a contributor to the book Dancing With Digital Natives: Staying in Step With the Generation That's Transforming the Way Business is Done (May 2011, CyberAge Books). An award-winning columnist, Michelle's focus is on emerging trends in digital content and how they shape successful business practices. She speaks at a variety of industry events and serves as a judge for content and technology competitions. She has worked in book and magazine publishing for more than 20 years in areas ranging from pop culture to academic nonfiction and holds a BA in journalism from San Francisco State University.

With more than 6,500 employees, a number of locations, and a broad mandate, managers at Dartmouth-Hitchcock health care system are responsible for a steady and diverse stream of projects at any given time. Dartmouth-Hitchcock's interim director of content and publications, communications and marketing, Ryan Newswanger, supervises a wide range of short and long-term web projects at any given time. His team was using a content management system and basic project management software to keep track of the team's activities, but was struggling to keep projects on track and on time. Newswanger felt his team constantly risked missing deadlines. He decided that deeper insights were needed into the entire scope of the projects he managed in order to better meet deadlines, but also to set realistic goals and project requirements.

Be it in the form of a private collection of rare manuscripts to the massive assortment of images, documents, letters, and much more gathered at the grandest public institutions, curation - organizing and maintaining a collection -- has been around as long as there were things of value and places to keep them safe. Yet many of these collections sit in isolation, available to only a privileged few. They also are at risk of damage, deterioration, and even destruction.It is with these issues in mind that Gale, part of Cengage Learning, set about to create its Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) collection. NCCO brings together rare primary source materials - monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs and more - from more than 100 individual collections.

Brand-named writers, marquee editors, and publications named after founders is nothing new to publishing. Think H.L. Menken, Walter Winchell, Anna Wintour, Helen Gurley Brown, Brill's Content, O, Martha Stewart Living... In some cases, the brand elevates the writer or editor to recognizable status; in others, the publication is purely an extension of an individual's personal brand.With the rise of social media, the professional is personal. Social is fundamentally entwined with media. Yet as it has always been for old media, there is risk for new media too reliant upon the one-man-brand. When a brand is bound to a single personality, there are issues of scale, growth and, of course, the potential for implosion upon the eponymous leader's departure.

Much attention is focused on the struggles of traditional news media brands to profit from the transition from print to digital. One often-discussed issue faced by media companies is the vast quantity of free alternatives-which range from bot-driven headline scraping to one-person blog sites and a whole generation of new media brands. Among these new media disrupters are an increasing number of operations with reputations for timely targeted news and content quality that have begun to rival those of some of the most venerated traditional media brands.High on that list is The Huffington Post.

Money is the root of all evil. It is also the foundation upon which economies are built. Certainly, it's high on the list of objectives for most organizations. Hey, even not-for-profits have to cover costs. So how do we reconcile this yearning for earning with such laudable corporate mottos as "do no evil"? Companies with good reputations generally earn them by delivering genuine value to customers. These, and others, often offset craven capitalistic endeavors by doing good works. Value and giving back are certainly admirable tactics, and I would not discourage any company from following this righteous path.

In publishing, small is the new big. An increasing number of publishers are releasing e-singles -- short works published digitally on a variety of platforms -- to generate ancillary revenue, build brand equity, and reach new audiences. Among those joining the e-singles market are Hearst, Rodale, Princeton University Press, and as recently as last week, Penguin.

I bought an e-reader recently. Late to the party, eh? It isn't that I haven't longed for one for some time now. The issue for me has been that, given the number of them on the market and rapid pace of change, I couldn't commit. The feature set I want never seems to coincide on a single device, and every time I think I've compromised and settled on one that's good enough, well, market leaders and innovators alike improve on what's out there or introduce some game changer.

Who you know has pretty much always been as important as what you know in business. Today it is not only important; it is essential and highly visible. Your network will help you get a job, advance within your profession, and solve day-to-day dilemmas. In fact, on a personal level, your social network may make or break you in any of these situations. However, the social network is no longer something that affects us only on a personal scale. Today, organizations that do not grasp the importance of social interaction risk their viability.

Do not try to predict the future of content. This is a fool's errand. Accepting that you have no idea what the next big thing will be is the first step. Admit your helplessness before the erratic shape shifter that is consumer preference for content consumption. Now that you have released any notion of anticipating which way the content market is heading, you are ready to begin anew.

Given the rise of social media and socially mediated everything-from sales to customer communication-it might seem rather obvious that content consumers want to interact with information and those who produce it. However, as an old school content producer who still produces print publications, I am painfully aware of a "digital divide" that exists between the way we conceive of content for print and the way it wants to be consumed digitally.

We've seen the shuttering of dozens of B2B publications, we see some moving online only, and we see the emergence of web-native alternatives that leverage work-at-home flexibility to create content at a lower cost: no offices, no benefits, no salaries, lower freelance fees, etc. However, even these nimble web-based companies are struggling to survive on banner ads and webinars.

I like free as much as the next guy. But here at EContent, we are painfully aware of the impact of giving away too much milk: The price of cows drops to near zero. And by milk, I mean content. And by cows, I mean content. So it was with great interest I read "A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story" in firstMonday. The paper examines Flat World's business, including Alpha and Beta testing with students and faculty from a variety of community colleges and universities. While this paper has a reasonable academic method and tone, it fails to deliver on its title for me: I want to know if the model can play out profitably in practice.

Newsweek just published a story on the decline of crowdsourcing. Well, it certainly behooves "old media" to foretell the failure of "new media" models. However while the article touches on some of the ways in which social media can pay dividends, it fails to communicate the connection between the needs of your social set and finding the appropriate pay scale.

Been reading up on low-cost content producer (aka "content farm") Demand Media's IPO and thought it might be useful for our readers to pull together some of the most interesting interpretations I've read so far...

The ereader price wars have heated up to the boiling point with e-readers from Amazon and Barnes and Noble dropping to under $150. However the announcement of a $99 5" LCD e-reading device on the horizon from new entrant Copia, there's much speculation that all e-reader device makers will need to compete in the hundred dollar range. Copia plans to compete on more that price point alone. Anthony Antolino, SVP of Copia Interactive, gave me a tour of the company's "content delivery and social media platform," which the company not only believes will be its product differentiator, but which it has high hopes will transform the e-reading experience across a wide range of devices.

When it comes to Social Media, Google has not had much success, culminating in its announcement yesterday that it would no longer develop Google Wave. Google Buzz remains alive, if not well, and the company is said to be poised to deliver another Social Tool, Google Me that would "compete with Facebook." Well, you can't blame 'em for trying. As I said, I'm impressed at the willingness to keep throwing ideas out there--demonstrating the kind of startup entrepreneurial spirit a lot of large companies would do well to emulate. I think that, given the negative buzz surrounding the Google Buzz launch, the company must focus more attention on how to successfully roll out these new tools.

It's been a while since we have heard from Vamosa here at EContent. Last news we got from them was about Content Migrator 3 back in December 2009. Vamosa's outside PR rep reached out to me today about reviewing the company's new collaborative content analysis tool and, well, I found myself saying "what new tool?" All that aside, the company recently introduced WebWorxx, a collaborative tool that allows the person responsible for web content compliance to generate work packages and delegate the content owners to resolve any issues found.

Video syndication platform 5min Media partnered with Answers.com to give the information seeking site a new medium, Video.Answers.com. Answers is undoubtedly trying to capitalize on the popularity of online video--the fastest-growing media platform in history, according to social media research consultancy Trendstream and research firm Lightspeed. With this move, Answers Corporation, which owns and operates Answers.com, aleading Q&A site, which includes WikiAnswers and ReferenceAnswers will also address the rise in popularity of video based "answer" sites such as Howcast Media and eHow...

News Corp is apparantly nearing a decision on whether to start a news organization to provide content for a subscription application on digital tablet devices. The move may well be related to the company's acquisiton of the Skiff platform from Hearst Corp. in June.

"National Literacy Trust Research Reveals More Young People Own a Mobile Phone Than a Book." Although that headline doesn't tell the whole literacy story, it does kick off this provocative point: "Findings from new National Literacy Trust research ... reveal that 86% of young people in the UK own a mobile phone, while only 73% have books of their own. The study of over 17,000 young people reveals a strong link between both young people's reading ability and access to books at home."

Ebooks have moved out of the niches and into the mainstream, and this panel demonstrated how players of all types are examining the opportunities they present. Not surprisingly, one of the primary concerns forum expressed is confusion given the number of devices and competing standards on the market It is time to rebuild the ebook infrastructure from the ground up.

Today, the influence of our peers has taken on a new guise, through the infinitely expanded sphere of community online. While we are all socially motivated to one extent or another, today, the role of social life extends well beyond the lunchroom, and it is profoundly impacting every aspect of business.

When ContentNext founder Rafat Ali, took the stage at the debut paidContent Conference, he made his position clear saying that he "supports a variety of business models and revenue streams." And for this event, the bottom line theme was supporting the bottom line.

While tempting, it would be a mistake to write off the dire state of the news business as simply a reflection of the general decline in print readership since the rise of the internet or as just another casualty of the recession. The problems run deeper. And to make things worse, the newspaper industry finds itself in this sorry state just as a new generation enters the work force-one with less connection to traditional news media than ever before.

Tara Hunt is on to something when, in her book The Whuffie Factor, she says that today Andy Warhol's saying "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" has changed to "everyone will be famous to 15 people."

The EContent 100 judging team is a busy crew. Read their bios and you'll see that this is a group of people with some very demanding day jobs. For them to devote so much of their valuable time to compiling the list is remarkable. Certainly, it is their diversity and their deep day-to-day connection with the digital content industry that makes them qualified to undertake this task. Yet it does make the process even more challenging-as if trying to evaluate the merits of hundreds of companies weren't difficult enough.

I just finished reading the 20th anniversary edition of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourslves to Death. Even in the harsh light of hindsight, his analysis of television's effect on discourse remains compelling. In fact-when I consider the effectiveness of television as entertainment medium-I can see how efforts to transform news into entertainment in an attempt for the function to fit the form has contributed to the declining value of news.

It's not news that magazines are anorexic, newspapers are dropping in droves, and industry leaders are calling for everything from forbidding the use of headlines for linking to putting up pay walls around anything and everything. It feels frantic, even desperate.

I just got busted for referencing a '60s Charlton Heston movie. OK, I get nostalgic. So when I heard an interview in which someone referred to "slugs" in the context of journalism, I felt like I was taking another joyride in the Wayback Machine: Could slugs be alive and well in contemporary journalism?

Generation gaps are influenced by many factors: Some are moral, religious, and sociopolitical, while others are little more than quibbles over style. (Though at 18, fashion can take on fairly grandiose connotations.) While some gaps can be measured in hair or skirt lengths, others are almost unquantifiable in scope: shaped by political transformation, war, economic collapse.

To rescue the beleaguered newspaper industry, there has been talk of a return to paid content (not so sure about the soundness of trying to unring a bell), nonprofit endowments, or government bailouts. Yet, as we've seen with the auto industry, throwing money at complex business problems does not suffice. Consider the music business, beset by the increasing legal and illegal distribution of music online. Today, successful musicians are giving music away to make money on concert tickets. Deeply entrenched, seemingly fundamental models have to be rebuilt in light of digital distribution and the expectation of free content, despite the fact that making quality content costs money.

When I was a bartender back in my college days, I often marveled at what people were willing to do to get a free t-shirt. OK, it went beyond marveling: Sometimes the bouncers and I would really push it, trying to find a point at which the crowd would cry out, "No, we will not do a chicken dance while singing ‘The Tide Is High' just to get that Jägermeister t-shirt." The thing is, there was almost always someone willing.

My husband often jokes that he married me for the gadgets. When we first met, this certainly wasn't the case—I was a literary scout, and my booty consisted of manuscripts of forthcoming books (exciting stuff only to those of us eternally on the lookout for a great read). Not long afterward, however, he did fall in love with me (or my job) all over again: I joined the team at EMedia magazine, where we reviewed exciting emerging technologies, such as CD and DVD burners; and a variety of related technologies, such as different types of surround sound.

For decades, the fee versus free debate has carried on—with content industry players digging in deep at each end of the spectrum. Yet a more moderate model seems to be emerging: freemium. While not an entirely new concept in other sectors, traditional content players have only recently begun to leverage the business model in which the owner or service provider offers basic features to users at no cost and charges a premium for supplemental or advanced features. The term, which combines the words free and premium, was coined by Jarid Lukin of Alacra in 2006 after venture capitalist Fred Wilson developed the concept. With the launch of its Alacra Street Pulse product this week, the company is drinking its own catchphrase Kool-Aid.

There's an argument to be made that econtent is green content. Of course, the "e" in econtent doesn't refer to ecologically friendly; it is for electronic, which bears its own significant environmental footprint. However, we are pleased to report that our industry prides itself on recognizing the opportunity that digital alternatives may provide to possibly alleviate some of the impact the content industry has on our planet.

These are not the best of times to be a technology start-up. Then again, the economy isn't being particularly kind to any industry—from those ripe for a business model overhaul to the seemingly infallible. SIIA Previews--which kicked off this year's Information Industry Summit, held in New York January 26th-28--offers a place for new ideas to bubble up. However, given the tone of the day's keynotes, this is neither the time nor place for bubble business models.

My audiobook ended while I was driving into the office. With 30 more minutes of back roads to navigate, I opted to listen to the radio. I have a few different stations programmed into my radio, as my epic commute takes me in and out of the range of several. Clicking until I hit a live station, I was immediately intrigued by an accented voice discussing the history of the Nobel Prize. I glanced up to where, on another day, my satellite radio receiver would sit, to find out who was speaking. Alas, it was analog. So I had to wait until the end of the Democracy Now! program to learn that it was Peter Zander, curator of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

There have always been families who lived in remote areas, but most of us count on an extensive network of interconnectivity with friends, family, co-workers, and even random encounters with strangers. This has become amplified by our always-on connectivity and intense social interaction online.

I can sing the alphabet backward. I learned it as a child and it sticks with me, just like its more popular cousin, the alphabet song. In his keynote at Enterprise Search Summit West, held Sept. 23-24 in San Jose, Calif., Gene Smith said that social discovery isn't new. It's been around a lot longer than I've known any alphabet songs—not to mention the web, much less its 2.0 iteration.

A former EContent assistant editor, Kinley Levack, forwarded me an August column from The New York Observer, The Media Mob. Her email bore this subject line: "I will always think of you when I hear this phrase …" Alas, the column was not about the most inspiring bosses ever. In fact, it was about "The New Media Religion: ‘Platform Agnostic.'"

Many of us know that bookstores employ "cooperative advertising," which is little more than a pay-for-placement arrangement. So who can we trust? I get my best recommendations from friends, colleagues, and the library staff-picks shelf. In some ways, I am old-fashioned. However, I have also become quite addicted to user reviews...

Agile thinking is something we do everyday. Perhaps we miss a word or two on a bad phone connection, or we don't express our thoughts clearly in an email, yet the person on the other end of the communication detects myriad clues from context or experience to interpret meaning, or asks follow-up questions for clarification. Michelle Manafy, editor of EContent magazine, waxes eloquently on the topic . . .

I don't understand knowledge management. Yes, it is among the things we cover, but I swear it is the one of the most elusive. While content may be reduced to something as ephemeral as zeros and ones or bits and bytes, knowledge is one of the ultimate intangibles. How do you capture it in the first place so that you can make it manageable? It's like trying to catch air with a net.

With digital distribution, the rules are still emerging and, like publishing business models, will continue to do so. Some things remain almost constant, though, such as the free versus fee debate. From B2B magazine and daily paper models to newsstand sales and high-value subscription content, the publishing business has always demanded a range of formulas for feeding the bottom line.

I earned a couple of memorable C’s in my academic history. One was for my capricious foray into physics, which I took as a college elective in an effort to follow the cryptic conversations my physics-major best friend had with her science pals. The other was in fifth grade handwriting. My teacher was appalled at my sloppy penmanship. She sent home a note to my mom, and they both stepped up the practice sessions … to no avail. Two years later, my grandmother bought me my first typewriter. I am forever indebted.

EContent editor Michelle Manafy interviews Peter Krogh, author of The DAM Book and Microsoft Icon of Imaging, about the importance of metadata in digital image preservation. Krogh provides tips for photographers as well as insights into the industry's role in long-term image preservation.

I threw away my dictionary. Tossed it. Considered my cluttered desk and decided it was time to take a critical look at what was crowding this valuable real estate. I gathered a stack of books I've always kept near at hand and, as I wiped the dust off of them, came to the realization that, while I look up the occasional tricky bit of grammar in my tiny, trusty Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, I literally haven't used my dictionary or thesaurus in years.

Part of email's appeal from the start was its ability to link team members who didn’t have the luxury of sharing a space. In some cases, it was teams comprised of individuals throughout a university campus; in others, it was researchers located across the globe. There is also a characteristic that computer folk and academics share: a tendency to keep odd hours. Email helped with this. Much of early email was limited to internal-only mailbox systems that let team members leave messages for others to pick up and respond to whenever they happened to come in and boot up. So, between team playing and time shifting, what’s not to love? A whole lot.

Today in Arizona, pack mules will deliver mail to the Havasupai tribe. Their village, Supai, clings to the side of the Grand Canyon, and—as has been the case for a century—mules still provide the most efficient means of delivering the mail. This isn’t to imply that the Havasupai don’t get email. They are certainly online, as many of the packages delivered to them are products purchased through the web.

When people hear the word search, they think web search. For better or worse, their minds go to a single blank box in which they key in one or two words, hit Enter, and are then barraged with an incomprehensible quantity of results. If the searcher is lucky, the information they need will be found on the first page or two. If not, they may just abandon hope.

We old-timey publishing folks think in terms of lead time: We always think a couple of months in advance. I'm more likely to have trouble remembering what month it actually is than the fact that I'm working on my October column right now, just finished editing October news, am editing November features, and am voting on the December EContent 100 list.

News aggregation is a beleaguered market that has become increasingly consolidated and beset by free news portals. However, with its acquisition of NewsEdge from the Thomson Corporation, Acquire Media believes it can sharpen this product with its technological edge, and hone it into a leading targeted real-time news tool.

Despite his lighthearted take on the power of the Google brand, senior product and marketing manager for Google Enterprise Kevin Gough had some serious insights into how the consumer market dictates expectations inside the enterprise. Without doubt, IT departments hear users say they want enterprise search to “work like Google,” while serious searchers bemoan the sheer quantity of results the engine generates.

Bad marketing makes me sick. From releases comprised of extreme hyperbole to buckshot-spray pitches and spam-filter clogging quantity, I am inundated with the bad and the ugly, along with the good. This week, I read a press release that had the profoundly poor taste to “leverage” the shooting at Virginia Tech in order to promote its video search engine. I won’t mention the company’s name here because I wouldn’t want to give them more attention than they deserve. What is significant about the release, other than the depths to which those who aren’t good at their jobs will sink in an effort to get a little ink, is how it highlights the hottest marketing tool of the moment: user-generated video

The other day I was trying to track down someone I haven’t seen in about 20 years. I tried Google and, shockingly, received too many results. The two links on the first page of results that I clicked and skimmed through were old and not terribly useful. Next, I tried ZoomInfo. I actually find this service to be a bit spooky.

EContent magazine editor Michelle Manafy discusses practical applications of the Semantic Web with Eric Miller, president of Zepheira and former leader of the Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT.

"How does one quantify the cumulative impact and relevance of an individual’s scientific research output? In a world of not-unlimited resources, such quantification (even if potentially distasteful) is often needed for evaluation and comparison purposes (e.g., for university faculty recruitment and advancement, award of grants, etc.),” from An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output by J. E. Hirsch, Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, September 2005. Hirsch's solution considers the publication record of an individual, the number (Np) of papers published over n years, the journals (j) where the papers were published, and the number of citations (Njc ) for each paper.

Examples of fixed and fluid organizations abound. There are those that rely on size and dominance to maintain the status quo and those which, even if they are large, stay nimble and evolve with the marketplace, in part by tapping the collective web whims and wisdom.

Charles Simonyi is slated to be the fifth day-tripper to visit the International Space Station and plans to document his adventure online with a blog, pictures, an “Ask Charles” forum, and more. I bet there will be a good-size audience for some vicarious thrill riding. On the other hand, despite the novelty of civilian space travel and Simonyi’s cyber-extended nerd entourage, I can’t quite picture whole families huddled around the computer to watch.

EContent Editor Michelle Manafy discusses the basic legal issues that any would-be podcaster should be aware of with Jeffrey P. Hermes, a partner in Brown Rudnick's Litigation Department who focuses on First Amendment law.

Maybe it is the nature of publishing, but I don't remember ever working in the same office with every member of my team. I've witnessed the evolution of digital collaboration first hand and with hands on: from taking typewritten copy from writers and keying it into a Verityper all the way to building and using wiki workspaces.

A plane hit a building in New York. I saw it on the evening news. The evening news saw it on YouTube. Right in the middle of the broadcast, the anchors cut to a YouTube video of the tragic event. The audience is making the news these days.

In a recent edition of John Lienhard's The Engines of Our Ingenuity, which I heard in the car on National Public Radio, Lienhard discussed the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet—brilliantly tying in the naming of the Disney dog. When I went to the University of Houston's site to check the name of the episode ("Poor Old Pluto"), I found that in addition to offering online transcripts of his commentaries on NPR, Lienhard now also provides them as podcasts. I will admit that I got what I needed from the transcript, but I clicked to listen anyhow, to reignite the flame of inspiration.

Simply put, really simple syndication isn’t simple at all. While ease of use on the consumer side—one-click subscription—is improving through aggregators like syndic8 or NewsGator, finding and using RSS feeds continues to mystify most readers. If you see that orange RSS (or XML) button and click, you get a discomfiting view of the code that makes the feed work. I don’t want to know. I just want to click, read, and go.

Most of the media is breathless about Web 2.0. While we’ve dipped our toes into the hyperbolic floodwaters here at EContent, our reporting has mostly been of specific applications, rather than a lot of the rah-rah coverage I’ve read in a number of mainstream and technology publications.

Tim Bray, one of the co-creators of XML who is currently the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, speaks with EContent magazine's editor, Michelle Manafy, about the power and promise of XML--including RSS and Web Services.

I have never lived in a development or suburb, but those I’ve visited seem to suffer from a confusion of quaint street-naming conventions in which Honeysuckle Lane intersects Honeysuckle Court. The fact that the houses look nearly identical is painfully exacerbated by the streets all bearing cloying and similar names, which has left me winding through speed bump-safe streets only to be frustrated by a surplus of cul-de-sacs. It leaves me with the impression that suburbs are insiders’ clubs, where only those who can detect the subtle distinctions between mass-market designs can navigate with confidence.

Copyright is not user-friendly. In fact, copyright issues are so complex it is hardly friendly to publishers or lawyers either. The complexity of copyright presents such a high hurdle that most users don’t even try to decipher its vagaries and just hit the Send button and hope for the best. Even those who personally want to adhere to copyright or whose organizations mandate it often find the process of clearing rights so daunting that it hardly seems worth it, thus inhibiting their ability to share valuable resources. In an effor to clarify the process, CCC has introduced Rightsphere, which provides “an instant, unambiguous answer to the user’s question, ‘What am I allowed to do with this content?’”

Face it: face time remains the most valuable way to forge relationships. While the Web makes it possible to find almost anyone, nothing compares to shoulder bumping and elbow rubbing when you want to make useful business connections. That’s why networking remains the most compelling reason to attend the Buying and Selling eContent conference. Not only is the show a content-biz Who’s Who, almost every aspect of it is designed to provide networking opportunities. In fact, sometimes the actual conference sessions feel like they get in the way of why everyone is really there.

Damien Stolarz, co-author of the Hands-On Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting, talks with Michelle Manafy, editor of EContent magazine, about the business of podcasting. Is the medium a flash in the pan or does it represent a significant technological innovation and present a meaningful business model?

The announcement of the Sony eBook Reader, expected out this month, triggered a flurry of speculation about the ebook market. We at EContent aren’t immune: We wrote about its Japanese predecessor (LIBRIé), covered its CES debut, speculated on its potential impact on the ebook market, and are angling for a review unit (as is every other media outlet on the planet). Sure, I’m interested in any delivery mechanism for digital content and the opportunity it offers as another content outlet, but damn, the new Sony Reader is just so small and hot!

The opening of the 2006 Winter Olympics was a picture of postmodernism. The athletes pointed still, phone, and video cameras back at the world watching them. It is interesting so many chose to be chroniclers of the moment rather than simply experience the fact they are living history. Yet, as each Olympics offers a time-lapse look at how humans push the boundaries of physical achievement forward—for me embodied in the women’s halfpipe snowboarding competitors, who only four years ago barely met TV cameras head on and now soar high above them—they provide similar insight into the way technology and the coverage of the events changes as well.

Patrick Spain, CEO of HighBeam Research (and one of the first to recognize the value of online information services) talks with EContent editor Michelle Manafy about user expectations of content flexibility… and how content companies can really deliver.

Google’s announcement that it was launching its very own Video Store dazzled a lot of folks. While the interface is anything but high-gloss (in fact, it is so understated—like all things Google—it’s almost silly), this “search engine’s” further push into media-mogul territory captured a whole lot of attention. Now that Google has not only taken on the biggies but joined their ranks, it isn’t surprising that it will counter Apple’s iTunes success with a stream mall of its own. Still, streaming video is hot, hot, hot, and a lot of ink (e- and otherwise) will be spilled analyzing this move and the populist approach Google has taken by putting “Joe’s home movies” on a virtual shelf right next to super-successful television series.

Stereotypes simplify social situations. Old person wise, young person foolhardy; tall person better basketball player, guy with pocket-protector better with computers; and policeman good, robber bad (or vice versa, depending on your perspective). Imagine all the hard work you’d have to do if you sincerely evaluated every individual you encountered, well, individually. So stereotypes serve as shortcuts for the socially lazy. But as my grandma used to say, “Anything worth doing is hard.”

The question facing digital entertainment companies seems to have changed from Can we implement effective DRM? to Should we even try? The shift seemed inevitable to some as one digital or audio DRM scheme after the next was swiftly circumvented. However, while some software distributors began to view pass-along as an inevitable fact of the digital distribution universe—developing DRM models to enable and monetize file sharing—the entertainment industry has been slow to follow.

I don't own a cell phone and rarely carry a laptop or PDA because, quite frankly, I have too much information and communication already. I do some of my best idea-formulation (even writing) during the brief lulls in between info-streams. The content clutter has to clear and then coalesce for things to make any larger sense. It isn't that I think I don't need to know more. I know I do.

I won’t go into book cover-judgment platitudes here; rather, I’ll suggest thinking a bit about the whole what-you-see-is-what-you-get proposition. In life, it usually means that just wanting something (or someone) to be one way or another won’t make it so. The problem with the assessment phase, I find, is spin. Like cars: one person’s standard is another’s option—and software’s no different.

The peer-review process is part of the foundation on which academic publishing was built, and while Open Source publishing models are emerging along with alternative outlets for scholarly publication, it remains the most respected method for assessing the quality of published works. Venerable publisher Elsevier is no stranger to the traditions of scientific, medical, and technical publishing, but has not shied away from leveraging digital delivery options for its works. In November of last year, the company launched its Scopus project, which is a multidisciplinary navigation tool that contains records dating back to the mid 1960s.

Each of us can look back on our lives and pinpoint individuals whose influence shifted our course for the better. It might have been the teacher who gave you a book of MC Escher drawings and talked to you about the interconnectedness of things and ways of seeing. Maybe it was a workplace mentor who taught you that tenacity is as important as a well-turned phrase. I have been lucky to have many such forces in my life, not the least of which was my grandmother, who showed me the power one woman had to make her life what she dreamed, that it is never too late to reinvent yourself, and that hard work will take you where you want to go. As she aptly explained, “Nobody ever told me life would be easy, so I don’t mind hard work.” She valued knowledge gleaned in the classroom but placed experiential learning on an equal plane.

While the market for business content remains strong, content providers are increasingly expanding their audience pool by offering wares in different packages and price points. Alacra’s announcement of its Alacra Store demonstrates an increasing trend of providing patrons with a variety of inroads to premium content.

At EContent magazine, we adhere to a strict separation of church and state. I think most reputable magazines do, but in trade publishing it is particularly challenging—and important—to maintain editorial integrity while balancing the interests of the vendors, who are both readers and potential advertisers. Despite this separation, I find myself with plenty of sales issues to think about. I’m not hawking ad pages or subscriptions, but many editors are concerned with the salability of their product in both of these arenas; it is our primary objective to fill pages with quality content that will attract readers—both for subscription revenue and to offer advertisers a desirable audience.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) may be really simple for publishers in terms of providing a quick alternate content delivery stream and it may be a relatively simple way to help avoid inbox info-glut, but it isn’t always so simple to integrate into an information-gathering routine. For the most part, RSS readers provide only the most basic functionality to do just that: read feeds. However, a few RSS readers out there are trying to do more—like help info-seekers find appropriate feeds, manage the incoming information for future use, and access it in different ways that suit a variety of needs. Pluck is one such feisty RSS reader.

Cut and paste culture might be all the rage on the creative side of the entertainment business but is often an anathema to the business side. While the latter will gladly pocket Gorillaz’ green, a team of lawyers probably frets over every echo of another artist’s work. At this year’s Entertainment Technology Alliance conference, I moderated a session called “Can Content Remain King?” in which—as usual—DRM surfaced as the highest hurdle for widespread entertainment digital content delivery.

What goes on in some people’s minds? On an April business trip to the Buying & Selling eContent show (BSeC) in toasty Arizona, I got stranded in a blizzard in Colorado. Surrounded by 40,000 other travelers in various states of distress, I found myself wondering why some come together during difficult experiences and pool resources and knowledge to better the situation while others turn competitive and adversarial, hoarding both assets and information.

The definition of content management continues to expand, while content often remains fragmented throughout organizations. For years, the market moved steadily in the direction of a broader and broader definition of content management, seeking to encompass everything from assets and data to knowledge and intelligence and adopting adjectives like Enterprise and Total. According to FileNet, the content management landscape is set for another tectonic shift.

I don’t know if my art is a dying one, but I do know that the way I have done business is fading like a weathered signpost. No doubt a lot of old-school publishing pros are haunted by similar specters: blogging, community journalism, news-harvesting tools, templated software that will “do the writing for you.” A multitude of new-world media methods are redirecting the flow of information, putting its navigation into hands other than our own.

Frode Hegland, a researcher at University College London (UCLiC), gives hyper new meaning. The native Norwegian, whose thought processes take tantalizing tangents to exponential extremes, wants to return to the one of the Web's founding principles: interactive information that actually informs.

If Richard Nixon is history, then Eddie Haskell is nostalgia. With history, we factor in the complexity and context in which things take place, seeing the bad and good through the tempered eye of perspective. Nostalgia filters reality through a soft-focus lens with blemishes retouched, so that even our villains are charming, if disingenuously so.

In the fee-based info world, this has been borne out by the increasing problem of information overload and the savvy content user’s preference for packaged content offerings that simplify the job at hand. The fact is that information is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Different users have different needs and, importantly, different sized organizations have different budgets for that information. OneSource Information Services, long known for its high-end business information product, Business Browser, has moved into the small to medium business information strata with the introduction of OneSource Express.

Focus is a good thing, but myopia isn’t. Once in a while I have to get my head up off the page (or screen, as is increasingly the case) and look around at what’s going on in the world. This doesn’t always mean a change of scene, though—this week content made the evening news.

"More, More, More, How Do You Like it?" Who knew that Andrea True’s disco lyrics would presage today’s digital information dichotomy? When you really need to know, quantity without quality just won’t do. Anybody using a search engine realizes that, unless you get a perfect hit on page one, too many results are a very bad thing. And if you are a researcher, the seemingly endless resources of the Web seem swell until you actually have to pull a needle of data out of a haystack of results.

News Technologies LLC has introduced the latest member of its TriggerNews family dubbed TriggerNews PL Multi-Brand. The product, announced in late August, builds on the company’s premise that information consumers need meaningful ways to bypass the information overload problem presented by the open Web and publishers need to get content to them in more targeted ways.

Newspapers grew out of local communities’ need to communicate, for the most part, the more mundane aspects of life, but over time, the newspaper’s role shifted from community service tool to expertise and entertainment vehicle. The Northwest Voice has gleaned a lot of press for being one of the first print and Web newspapers to be produced almost completely by voluntary contributions, in its case, from the people living in the northwest part of the Bakersfield, CA community it serves.

It’s enterprise everything these days. With the exception of gadgets, start big and get bigger seems to be the American way. But Macromedia took a different approach with its products from the start. It focused first on the single user with a need to create an attractive site. Then, with its Contribute product, Macromedia stepped up its offerings to teams and small businesses that wanted to more easily create and update site content. A few weeks ago, the company officially tossed its hat into the enterprise ring with the introduction of its Macromedia Web Publishing System. As much a strategy as a solution, the System combines new versions of Contribute and FlashPaper with Studio MX 2004, and adds Macromedia Contribute Publishing Services to unify and empower the suite to scale up to meet the needs of organization-wide deployments.

Most companies rely on several team members to create documents or employ a review process where a file passes through a potentially labyrinthine approval hierarchy. While word processing tools have eliminated issues like trying to read a colleague’s indecipherable handwriting or epic retyping projects, they come with their own shortcomings. Add to the process the advantages and limitations of email and the need to ensure that workers can use familiar office software in secure, accurate, efficient, and traceable ways becomes increasingly important.

Again, the dichotomy of being a digital content magazine rears its head here at EContent. Early this year, we worked with E-Book Systems on our very first foray into digital delivery of the entire magazine.

Companies everywhere are trying to conjure the magic formula that will miraculously transform their corporate intranet from being just another place to find the company phone list to its rightful role as the lifeblood of corporate communications. Intranets.com has developed a philosophy to coincide.

Increasingly, companies embrace the extranet as a better way to communicate with partners faster and more consistently. But once internal content becomes available outside the firewall, security needs increase exponentially.

Without a doubt, librarians (and libraries) represent more than a place to look for information. In fact, that part of their role—at least in initial forays and for superficial inquiry—has been rapidly subsumed by the Web.

The entertainment industry has been plagued with problems since the advent of digital distribution, but there are industry leaders trying to propose a new way of doing things; the founder of the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG), Leonardo Chiariglione, founded a new organization, the Digital Media Project (DMP), to do just that.

Digital content storage is big and dumb. To effectively do more than sit and store, it requires layers of complexity on top of its simple archival core. But the evolution of digital content has changed our expectations: We don’t just want to keep content, we want to access it, collaborate on it, and re-use it. Thus, stuffing assets away in some big box won’t do and if getting to it has to be a high-level IT function, then what happens to the goals of building a broader user base?

Some still read for pleasure, but as a society, we are expected to ingest ever more information and, as such, seek the most expedient means to slurp up what we need to know. And, without a doubt, the browser/search engine combination has caused a tectonic shift in the way we expect to locate and consume the information we seek.

Libraries lead the way in pioneering many digital initiatives, but what the local library implements to manage its ejournal collection or even a more ambitious digital archiving project will rarely scale to enterprise proportions

Mobile needs to be free to take any shape in order to find and empower users when and where they need it. But by virtue of its malleable nature, mobile is difficult to grasp and as a result, content providers—already cautious from scars garnered during the wild and wooly dotcom days—aren’t so quick to chase what might seem like a PDA pipe dream.

No stranger to the rise and fall of marketing budgets, Leopard, a business-to-business marketing communications services provider, saw a need for outsourcing the digital asset management that effective marketing mandates. After frequently finding itself in the position of actually having to create technologies to better deliver marketing messages, the company added technology services or “business process outsourcing” to its traditional role as developer and deliverer of marketing strategies.

While many in the econtent industry have sought growth through all things to all people strategies, Hoover's developed a simple formula for success that they call SMB2. This equation translates into the company's focus on the Sales, Marketing, and Business development professionals found in Small and Medium sized Businesses.

When the company adopted the name Neoteris, they believed the definition, new land, reflected their mission of "pioneering a new land in simple, secure remote access." But three years later, these self-styled frontiersmen have set their sites on taking over some turf from the Web-based conferencing and collaboration providers.

Anyone in the content business who's lately heard a humming that sounds something like WebFountain but couldn't quite make out a distinct message, listen up. According to Robert Carlson, vice president of IBM's WebFountain project, they are "coming out."

Without achieving the right balance of planning, investment, and risk (and a multitude of other ingredients), a business won’t flourish. And according to Larry Prusak, who keynoted the recent Buying and Selling eContent conference, ideas are one key ingredient many businesses should not only be stocking up on, but also intensively home-growing in order to concoct a sure-fire formula for success.

Faced with a growing number of competitors in the electronic document delivery space, Adobe—the granddaddy of digital delivery—will strive to set itself apart from the pack with the release of Acrobat 6.0.

The latest generation of portal, CM, and elearning solutions all have one thing in common: improved ease of use. Well, at least the aspiration to allow less-technical members of the digital content food chain to more easily use these previously complex systems.

For some industries, access to real-time information provides calculable advantages. Take the investment sector, for one. Successful traders require an almost extra-sensory ability to intuit the ways in which major mergers and minor management changes will affect a stock's worth. These shifts can occur minute-by-minute and translate into to hard-earned or hard-lost money measured in seconds.